What Truth in Madness Lies
by Valieara
Summary: Little Will slept in the crook of her arm, caressed by her own chapped lips and another woman's mythical smile; and she remained, rooted to the spot by some force she could neither name nor know. Elizabeth survives the first twenty five years.


**Disclaimer: **I own nothing; for fun, not profit; etc.

**Spoilers/Setting: **Assumes you've seen the series through _At World's End. _

**Notes: **This can be read as complementing my earlier fic _Resonance_, but doesn't have to by any means.

* * *

Elizabeth Swann had been a mere nineteen years old when she introduced herself as Elizabeth Turner to Captain Barbossa and spent a month aboard the Black Pearl.

She'd been twenty-one by the time her wedding was ruined, shortly after which she'd once again left behind the idea of life on shore; and at the end of those intervening six months, she'd been married, pregnant, and desperately alone.

She was twenty-two when she gave birth to her son in a small wooden home Jack had helped her build on his voyage back from Florida. She remembered hefting lumber and logs around her five-month swollen belly, while on the other end Jack regaled her with tales of the American settlers, half-starved and lonely, whether in dying towns along the eastern coast of the continent, or in one-man shacks five miles inland. Jack had stayed with her a month, making sure that a maid stayed with her and that her expenses were paid until two weeks after the child's birth.

"Then, love, I'm afraid you're on your own," Jack had said; and she'd nodded and grinned with all the wild ferocity she'd still had left in her, her eyes glancing to his dinghy, her heart beating fast and hard against her ribs at the thought of it.

"Of course you'll return to sea, Jack," she'd replied, attempting to suppress the weight of her heart. "I'd expect no less of you."

He'd frowned, and she'd almost laughed at that oh-so-delightful familiarity, that half-madness that lurked around the edges of his eyes and lips and _oh, _the hysteria of it all!

"I'll not try and decipher whether that was an insult, and be on me way," he'd said in the end, bowing to her in a bit of a mock show, and she'd smiled bittersweetly.

"I only wish I could come with you," she'd said sincerely. "I fear company here will be sorely lacking."

He'd nodded at her, serious and still. "You'll raise your boy right, Elizabeth," he'd assured her. "Mind that he knows his upbringing."

And holding her newborn son, left alone on a cliff with the sweeping vistas that could not begin to describe the sheer breadth and span of her girlhood, she cried with the madness of desolation until she laughed at those Virginians, and wondered if she did not know their existence after all.

oOo

_Calypso, _the men had called her, for just a moment; and for a half second of wide-eyed absurdity, she'd believed it.

She'd known then that she would hold onto that feeling for the rest of her life; and in the first few months, she sat by the sea to calm her roiling spirit and remind herself of truth in all its many forms and facets, whatever it was or wasn't.

_Elizabeth, Elizabeth, Elizabeth_, it would call her, eternal and maddening, chewing her name around a thick accent made swollen by rotten teeth and a determining horror of a grin, before giving it back to her on a harsh whisper, embodied in the dash of the waves against rocks and the too-capricious wind.

Little Will slept in the crook of her arm, caressed by her own chapped lips and another woman's mythical smile. She shivered at the feel and sound of it, but remained, rooted to the spot by some force she could neither name nor know; and somewhere, Calypso smiled.

oOo

Her son was five years old when he first looked at her in fear. The thunder from the storm shook the house, and one of her hands had closed like a vise around his wrist, while the other searched blindly for a weapon she'd put away since Will had begun toddling about the place.

The next time he looked at her so, she called him out of hiding in the middle of the night to where she stood outside, the fog rolling all about them in the beauty of the unknown.

This was the night he first asked about his father.

_Mind that he knows his upbringing, _Jack had told her; and this night, she loosened the ropes and let the honesty of the absurdity fly high and wild, wondering if she'd dreamed it all after all.

oOo

The difficulty in concocting these stories she told her son had lain not in the interest of what came next, but in hiding it. Until this point, Elizabeth had never appreciated the intricacy with which the best of storytellers laid their traps and their riddles, stones in the path to dissociate, however seminally, truth from – or into – fiction.

But there was a kernel of a spark she'd never let go of cocooned deep inside her soul, and she reached for it at these times. For two hours, she'd stood at the helm of a furious battle, crowned king of a legend and sailing a legend with legendary men; and she'd felt herself swell into more than she was at that, if at nothing else.

She heard stories from time to time in the village, and picked out this kernel of her younger and other self, her eyes forward, her back straight, and her hair pulled neatly back. Few of the other washwomen dared approach her unless necessity demanded it, and this suited her well.

_Elizabeth_, Calypso was calling, and the wind blew harder on a cackle just to prove her point.

oOo

Her son was eight years old when a ship she would know anywhere made port in a harbor that by no means could _ever_ constitute a port. Still, she thrilled to see it; and she raced toward the sunset in short, heavy clouds of kicked-up sand, all hiked-up skirts and bare feet in a freedom she'd never entirely forgotten.

"Captain," she greeted the gnarly seaman, shocking him, surely, when she did not restrain herself from throwing her arms around him for a moment, and grinning so widely her cheeks hurt with the strain. "It is good to see a friendly face."

The irony of Barbossa being a friendly face was not lost on her.

"Aye," Barbossa responded, grinning himself. "Especially as it doesn't appear there be much in the way of those around here."

"Not that I am one to dictate when and where you do your pirating these days," she said in a laughing timbre, "but I might request you leave this town to me, and direct you to a more profitable venture a few islands away if you wish."

"Nay, we be here but for a lonely woman we hear's been here these last nine years and countin'," he replied. "Figured she might'a use some civilized company."

"Why, Captain Barbossa," she exclaimed, still high on the surprise of the Black Pearl's being here at all, "I wouldn't have guessed you had such humanitarian spirits in you."

Will was half-hiding in what skirts she had; and his eyes were wide at the sight of a real pirate, and a ship he'd taken to be legend even after all her stories and subsequent oaths that yes, they were true.

"And you must be Young William," Barbossa presupposed, crouching down a bit and removing his hat. "The last time I saw ye, you were yet unborn. It's been a long time, lad," he said, but directed his words to Elizabeth.

"So it has," she agreed. The wind was fierce today, and it tugged her hair fully free of its restraints, and all of them smiled at the sight.

"Come, lass, the wind's on our side!" Barbossa exclaimed brightly, offering her his arm. "You'll both dine with us tonight, for old time's sake."

And so they did; and it was a feast of apples and wits and old tricks and so many laughs that she cried.

oOo

("You're too noble to turn pirate, Miss Swann," Barbossa had told her on that first trip on the Pearl so long ago. It was a rare moment of solitude, and – dare she think it now? - solidarity between the two of them, which had then been odder still for the way she had only just finished shaking in her nineteen-year-old skin from the horrors she'd seen twenty minutes before.

"Then it is fortunate that I have no aspirations to become one," she'd replied, refusing to look at him, picking at that hideous burgundy tea dress he'd foisted upon her, idly wondering where and for what purpose he'd obtained it.

"Perhaps that be so," he'd said, with a wisdom she wouldn't acknowledge, "but you don't believe it, true though it may be. You long for the sea, same as me; but a pirate, you're not. It would do you good to remember that."

And now, Captain Barbossa looked at her, more than a decade older, and she felt him thinking the same. She missed the craft of seamanship. She missed the familiar feel of a sword in her hand, and the weight of firearms on her person; and she missed the never-precise dance of a fight. She missed knowing, without any doubt to the answer, where her place was in the world. She had served truth and justice where she could, circumstantially, and on a much grander scale than most could lay claim to; but there was an uncomfortable limbo to honesty of the more ordinary sort for which she hadn't planned.

King of the pirates though she had been, her place was not here.

"A good choice, Mrs. Turner," he praised her quietly as he escorted her out. "Your chance'll come; and I don't doubt we'll be meeting again."

It didn't stop her from wishing otherwise.)

oOo

"Do you believe me, now?" Elizabeth teased her son when they returned, ruffling his hair in the universal manner of mothers with their sons.

He ducked away in the equally universal response of young boys to their mothers, but he was smiling ever-so-slightly, and Elizabeth reached wide and drew him close to her side until they stumbled as they walked, and laughed as they stumbled.

"I don't know that I ever will, actually," Will admitted finally. "Even after that."

Elizabeth sighed. "Oh darling, if you only knew of all the things I can hardly even begin to explain to myself."

But he looked at her then in such a way that she felt both feared and revered as something more than his mother; and though he'd looked at her so a few times before, she still struggled to understand whether it was some form of madness she could not suppress, or something deeper and more profound.

For the fog reminded her of countless nights on uncharted sea; and the wind whirling her hair about her face reminded her of a freedom she had once tasted, viscerally; and the feel of fraying rope burning under her palm reminded her of an unknown power that coursed unbridled through her veins, and blazed unchecked from her eyes.

She wondered it if was some lost remnant of this that he saw, and wondered again how to explain something so ephemeral, and so instinctual. How to explain a hat ripped from her head and lost to a terrible lilting wind crying to her for vengeance? How to explain the beautiful coarseness of her throat, and the sight of forty standards rising at the sound of it?

But now the fog was rolling in, and the frayed ends of her hair were painting an invisible masterpiece across the canvas of her face, and she stood still a moment to revel in the dreadful beauty of it all.

"Pirate is in your blood, Will," she said seriously, for lack of less precise words; and she was surprised when he nodded at the statement.

"I know," he replied, still looking up at her in that curious way. She ruffled his hair if only to dispel it, and did not turn around to watch the Black Pearl disappear over the horizon, or into its fog.

(_Elizabeth_, she thought she heard, but ignored it.)

oOo

Her son was nine years old when her husband sailed in under their watchful eyes; and for a moment, Elizabeth was all giddiness and nineteen years old, _I told you I told you I told you_, because she had, and this was the justification of everything.

Her husband kissed her deeply when he descended from the Dutchman, and she saw his heart breaking in his eyes as he looked at her (their, she reminded herself) son.

"Will," Elizabeth called, holding out her hand to him. Her son took it. She looked up from beneath shy eyelashes, and said, "This is your father."

And oh, the bittersweetness of it all, and for one day, she did not think of the Virginians.

oOo

Jack sailed in again, this time on the Pearl, when her son was twelve.

"Why, if it isn't the infamous Captain Jack Sparrow," she greeted him salaciously as ever.

He merely smirked back at her. "And if it isn't my merry murderess." He came closer, and frowned. "This place has done no favors to your complexion at all, love; you might considering relocating, if you're in the market."

Will watched this all, bewildered. "Mum?"

"I do not believe I have had the pleasure of meeting you, man," Jack stepped up to him. "Captain Jack Sparrow."

Will only looked slightly less bewildered at that. "Will Turner."

"No doubt named for your father, eh?" Jack chuckled to himself at some joke Elizabeth could not possibly hope to understand. "I hear tell from the crew that the Pearl's made port here before under questionable captainship and different circumstances. Would you care to take a spin on my ship, my good man?"

Jack let Will take the wheel while watching carefully, while Elizabeth made her way through familiar spaces and greeted familiar faces. Eventually she made breeches of her skirts, tucking the back through her legs and into her waistband, and climbed halfway to the crow's nest, content to rest in limbo against the netting, her weathered fingers clutching the prickling rope as if that was all that mattered; and for that moment, it was. And oh, the wind in her hair and the salt of the air and the rush of the waves against the bow shuddering to the stern; and she breathed the whole of it in until her toes tingled with it and she shuddered in time with ship. The late afternoon sun was shining against her face like the gentlest benediction she'd ever been given.

"Are ye carin' to come down soon, lass?" called up a familiar voice, Barbossa's face still infinitely more weathered yet than her own worn hands. Here, at least, was some reassurance.

And there was Will, staring up at her inscrutably. She climbed down halfway, and jumped the rest of the distance.

"Avast," she said simply, shrugging and smiling at him, and seemed to momentarily quell whatever questions he had.

Barbossa smothered his snigger in a cough. Jack, however, had never employed such niceties. She glared at them both.

oOo

(She did not often let herself think on how the rhythm of the sea was more than nautical: it was phonetic.

"How you quick to forget," Calypso had crooned unbrokenly, but this time, Elizabeth had basked in it; and she didn't know which part frightened her more.)

oOo

"You know, Lizzie, I wasn't entirely joking about that complexion of yours," Jack told her later, the rest of the ship bustling behind him in unhurried efficiency as they prepared to set sail, once again.

"Then I'll rest comfortably knowing my appearance is quite enough worried over by you to save me from the trouble of it," she replied, a little miffed. "Honestly, Jack, what are you getting at?

"You can't stay here forever, Elizabeth," he pointed out. "Or you can, of course; but I distinctly sense that this is not the route you prefer."

She had thought about it, of course, and hated herself for even giving those thoughts existence, but giving those thoughts voice?

"It is no concern of yours," she said eventually.

Jack nodded. "Think about it, love. There'll be a place for you, provided we're all still alive when the time comes."

And though she was no pirate of gold and good men's lives, she found herself beginning to consider a life surrounded by it, tired of living with the voices of pagan gods and the long-dead in her mind.

oOo

Her son was nineteen years old when he married; and this was the same day she saw her husband again. There was no coincidence about it.

It was quite the simple affair, a quiet ceremony in town, but it left her feeling empty afterward; and no measure of her husband's loving attention could sway her from it.

"I wish I could come with you," she said later that day, against the sunset and a calm sea. Her hair was fast turning grey, or so her son told her, and though she hadn't seen her reflection in a mirror in quite a number of years, her wrinkles were pronounced enough to the touch.

"Then set sail again, Elizabeth," Will told her, holding her close. "I cannot begrudge you a life of your own. I've already asked too much of you, and left you alone with our child to raise. You've done that, now. You have no obligations. Take to the sea."

"You wouldn't begrudge this of me?" she asked him, moving to hold his face between her hands as though it would force him to hold her gaze in return; though she should not have had such fears.

"I never could begrudge you anything, Elizabeth," Will said, smiling tenderly at her, and she was again reminded of the boy who had been placed in her charge thirty years ago, drenched and innocent and so very enthralled with her.

She wondered what it was he saw when he looked at her.

"I'll still be here, once every ten years," she promised.

"That's all I can ask," Will assured her. "And more than I deserve."

Their parting was bittersweet; and she watched his departure with less despair than she might have.

oOo

"What a ship really is," Jack Sparrow had once told her, "is freedom."

Land-bound for more years than she could count, and more than she cared to, she remembered that statement, murmured so reverently and unequivocally she'd never questioned it.

She did not even now; but questioned her ability to attain it, shunted between mercantilism, the Crown, and piracy, and confronted by the fact that she was not a man. The latter point had not stopped her before; but now perhaps she had grown too comfortable in her slender curves that, after childbirth, could never again pass for a boy's.

She wondered at times how it had all come to happen, before thinking, _Oh, how I have grown old._

It was not enough, and her dreams were haunted and her days fitful.

oOo

She hallucinated sometimes, and her visits grew in both frequency and intensity after her son left her house.

Often, if oddly, her company was James Norrington; and somewhat less frequently, her father. Elizabeth didn't know whether this was because these men had loved her, and she was deprived of that particular sentiment at least as far as distance could prevent it, or simply because she was lonely.

They were not ghosts, of that much she was certain. Her conversations with them bordered on the ludicrous, sometimes brushing even past that into the realm of the facetious.

"What does the mind come to but sea creatures and peanut shells?" philosophized James in the corner while, for once, she tended to her own washing, rather than other women's.

"James dear, the fact that a conversation with you is beginning to resemble one with Jack cannot be a good sign," she replied lightly.

"Says the woman who hears a non-existent sea goddess speaking to her," James said petulantly. Elizabeth had the strangest compulsion to smooth down his hair and give him a motherly smile. She shook her head.

She supposed she shouldn't be encouraging these things which once she had blocked from her mind completely.

"I never said anything of the sort," she said, brow furrowed and hands almost-blistered to a bright red.

"Which speaks nothing as to what you believe."

And this, Elizabeth acknowledged, may be true, if one could differentiate between what one believed and what one simply knew.

oOo

(And she dreamed sometimes of times past and future, but never present.

Tonight, the fog was rolling in, and clothed in only her shift, she lay down on the shore and let the waves lap over her legs, creeping up higher and higher as the tide rolled in along with it, until her golden hair was floating around her in an eerie ethereality borne of the sea.

There had been art books in her girlhood home in Port Royal a lifetime ago; and always partial to Renaissance art, she'd come back again and again to Botticelli. Tonight she thought of the Birth of Venus, but her mind repainted it in dark tones and thick swaths: Venus not birthed, but rebirthing, sea-kept and sea-sound.

Calypso rose before her, sea goddess incarnate, a liquid sculpture perpetually shifting in dissipate night, and thrown into droplets of stars, only just-contained by a force Elizabeth could not know.

"Now you know," she said, raining over Elizabeth in the sweetest baptism she'd ever felt. "Now you _realize_."

"Yes," she replied, for the first, last, and only time.

Venus on a pearl, she thought, and grinning madly at both the error and ridiculousness of the idea.)

oOo

Elizabeth was forty-five when the Black Pearl arrived for the third time.

"Permission to come aboard, Captain?" she called up, deliberately leaving off a name.

"Granted," two voices called back to her, and she grinned, climbing up the side.

"Welcome back to the Black Pearl, Mrs. Turner," Barbossa said, giving her a hand to lever herself up. "Decided a life of loneliness did not suit ye, now?"

"Indeed," she replied. "I hear it drives the Virginians mad."

And she breathed in the wildness of the open sea, feeling it unfurl, at home, in her very soul; and again, she grinned with all the wild ferocity she had left in her.

Barbossa nodded, grinning himself to see it. His feather waved back at her from the brim of his hat. "Aye," he said. "That it does."


End file.
